This year, the Premier League welcomes Leicester City, Burnley and Queens Park Rangers back into its profitable embrace. But how will they survive against the big boys? Iain Macintosh offers five helpful tips.

Don't panic

Contrary to popular opinion, newly promoted teams actually have a good chance of survival. Of the 15 teams that have come up in the past five years, only four have gone straight back down again. In 2011-12, all three of the new boys escaped the drop. QPR were perhaps rather fortunate...

Whatever the result, this will be a historic day in American history. There will never have been more full kit clowns at U.S. desks and cubicles across the nation. This is the day we have dreamed of over the past 17 months of qualifying, living and dying as 38 players swaggered through 16 games.

Beneath the confident veneer of the red, white and (occasionally stonewashed) blue polyester we are wearing, most fans are braced, experiencing giddy mood swings between "God Bless America" to Götterdämmerung....

Carlos Alberto Parreira is a World Cup perennial. No manager has led more nations into a tournament campaign. When Felipe Scolari reclaimed the reins of a wobbling Brazilian national team in November 2012, the 71-year old Parreira became the nation's technical director as the two men -- World Cup winners both -- were hailed as "two sides of a victorious coin."

As the Brazilian national team attempt to fulfill what many of their countrymen consider to be their divine right -- winning the World Cup...

The mood in Jacksonville, Florida, is different from the stressed isolation of Palo Alto, California, and the media-propelled chaos of New York City. The U.S. team appear both looser yet more intense. Arriving in Florida 14 days before their opening group-stage game, the players have a clearer sense of the squad hierarchy, yet in practice, head coach Jurgen Klinsmann is noticeably ratcheting up the emotion, chastising and bellowing at his charges in training.

The first thing I did after landing at Sao Paulo's Guarulhos International Airport for the 2013 Confederations Cup was nip into the gentleman's bathroom. I emerged positively giddy after discovering that in Brazil even the urinal cakes in public bathrooms had famous strikers' faces etched on them.

Here was immediate proof of the nation besotted with football I had always heard about, one in which, after searing national team losses, suicides are rumored, government inquisitions demanded and Brazilian...